Tedded - Business Book Review

I talked to my girlfriend today. She said she hated it when authors refer to any management or business practices by symbols

Things like:

Blue Ocean
Black Swan
Spider and Starfish
Purple cow

etc, etc.

To name a few.

A hedgehog and a fox in Jim Collins’ Good to Great pissed her off.

She pissed me off.

I did try to give her the reason, I couldn’t.

So, I thought of the book Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath who laid out the the six elements making your idea stick (SUCCES)

1. Simplicity

2. Unexpectednedd

3. Concreteness

4. Credibility

5. Emotions

6. Stories

…

I told her that ideas need to be “concrete”, you need to get the picture of what you’re talking about!

Do you know a “pomelo”? Chip and Dan Heath hinted it is a supersized “grapefruit”. And you get the idea right.

I tried to ask my girlfriend this but…

Thai people don’t know grapefruit! We know pomelo! (And both me and my girlfriend live near Nakhon Prathom, the city of pomelo itself!)

(image source: www.domesticthai.com)

(I got the idea of the grapefruit when Heath brothers wrote that a supersized grapefruit is a pomelo)

Trying to communicate that a grapefruit is a pomelo mini-me was confusing and it was all messed up…

And she told me that she does believe in things like matrices, graphs, and models… Not the metaphors

Mind you, we argued back and forth for like 30 minutes.

I came to a conclusion that she’s far too scientific and systematic and I, on the other hand, am unstructured and intuitive.

The question is: “Is Business a science or an art?”

How many books do you normally buy each time?

Now I have six books in the amazon.com’s cart.

1. Reality Check - Guy Kawazaki
2. A Sense of Urgency - John Kotter
3. Tribes - Seth Godin
4. Who - Geoff Smart and Randy Street
5. Influence - Robert Cialdini
6. The Snowball - Alice Schroeder

They will keep me in peace for quite a while

………

I listened to this talk from TED.com by Barry Schwartz, the author of “The Paradox of Choice” (2003)

I really like his metaphor in the closing remark

“The truth of the matter is that if you shatter the fishbowl, so that everything is possible. You don’t have freedom, you have paralysis. If you shatter this bowl so that everything is possible, you decrease satisfaction”

“Everybody needs a fishbowl”

In sum, it means if we are living in world of indefinite choices, you’ll be in paralysis. Sometimes, we need to be limited.

I believe it’s true and actually this “more choice, less satisfaction” has been ingrained in human feeling for a long time already, that’s why we have the word “customisation” in other words, “this is your fishbowl”.

Back to my amazon.com’s list in the cart. Despite the fact that amazon.com is the largest retailer on the internet, when I see amazon.com, I only see the business and investing book section

Is it my fishbowl? perhaps. No offense to million other things, this section is the only thing I care about.

What’s your fishbowl? Did you offer your customers comfortable fishbowls?

Did you shatter their fishbowls?, offering something they don’t give a *#!% about.